


my defense

by storiesfortravellers



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Guilt, Imagination, Science, Weapons, inventing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-13
Updated: 2014-05-13
Packaged: 2018-01-24 14:18:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 394
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1608212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/storiesfortravellers/pseuds/storiesfortravellers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony wonders if someone will use his inventions as weapons.</p><p>For this prompt at comment-fic on lj:  <i>imagination is my defense</i><br/>from "The Creationist" by Kerli</p>
            </blockquote>





	my defense

If Tony calculated it (and he’s not going to), it’d probably be fairly clear that statistically speaking, someone, someday, will turn his tech into a weapon. 

Someone, someday, will force him to be a merchant of death (again).

Everyone always worries about the suits: what will happen if the wrong sort gets hold of them? Will the whole world fall to Tony’s suits?

(Tony thinks everyone but himself, and possibly Rhodey and Pepper, are the wrong sort, but he usually doesn’t say so. Directly.)

Tony isn’t actually worried about the suits. He’s installed safeguard after safeguard, not to mention that JARVIS can kick some ass if need be as well.

The thing that keeps Tony up at night isn’t the suit; it’s the random little things, the tech advances that might become something else if someone put enough work and creativity into it. The chip Tony invented to make StarkPhones faster than its competitors. The energy efficient cores sold en masse to holders of large buildings. The nanolasers Tony created to heal people affected by Extremis.

Stark could turn any of these into a truly terrifying weapon. Which means that probably out there, there’s someone else who can too.

He wonders sometimes if he should just give it all up. If he should become some reclusive genius (he can see the magazine articles now). He could invent things and never share any of it, not until after he’s dead, so he’ll never have to see what his technology will wreak.

But he knows he won’t be able to do it. He knows that he’ll never be able to stop working, and once he creates something, he won’t be able to keep it to himself. His imagination didn’t live in ascetic scientific bliss, seeking knowledge purely for the blossoming of his own mind. It clawed at him from inside, fire and need, waiting until it could reveal itself, pressing relentlessly until the moment it would be able to face the world, breathe it deeply, baring the fruits of its labor to the world.

So he keeps working. And with every invention, he creates a contingency plan, and another one for when the first one goes wrong, hoping that when the time comes, it will be enough.

He knows it might not be. Probably won’t be. But he can’t quite bring himself to calculate the odds.


End file.
